As technology continues to develop, it is not only usual with medical image recording facilities to generate larger image data records with higher resolution but frequently as part of a patient examination a plurality of images are also frequently generated and stored as image data records. It is conceivable for example to record up to 3,000 images as part of a single examination, so that an enormous storage capacity is required. It is therefore usual to remove the images, in particular even immediately after recording, from the corresponding computation facility of the image recording facility and to transmit the image data records to a second computation facility, for example a central diagnostic workstation or even directly to a computation facility of an image management system (PACS archive computer).
Medical image data records are currently stored and further processed almost exclusively in what is known as the DICOM standard (digital imaging and communication in medicine). It can of course generally come about that transmission failures occur or the received image data records cannot be stored by the second computation facility and/or inserted into the archive. For such problems the DICOM standard provides a storage commitment function, with which the sending, in other words the first, computation facility can enquire, after the data transmission has been confirmed, whether the transferred data has been safely stored. This is of interest for example when, as described above for example, the first computation facility wishes to delete the image data records and would like to ensure that they have also been archived or safely transmitted. When the second computation facility receives such a storage commitment request, it checks whether the received image data records have been safely stored and, if so, sends a corresponding confirmation back to the first computation facility.
However this storage commitment service in the DICOM standard is only rarely used, as on the other hand the intention is to achieve a high-performance transfer of large quantities of data and such additional messages are prejudicial to this. It is therefore currently frequently the case that only an early transmission confirmation is sent directly after receipt of the image data records, from which it cannot however be determined whether all the images were transmitted correctly or whether the archiving or storage of the images was successful. In the worst instance it may therefore be that if the first computation facility has already deleted the image data records, recordings are lost completely.